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Girrrrl Power!

One of my friends mentioned the other day that he had seen the movie Rogue One, the latest Star Wars offering. He said he liked it, which I thought surprising. From the commercials, I was under the impression that it was another Girrrrl Power! movie telling us that girls can do anything they set their pretty little heads to, even if the evil white men try to stop them. Put another way, it looks like another movie that has a tiny little female in a role that was traditionally played by a tough guy leading man.

He said it had a lot of that nonsense, but the shoot ’em up stuff and special effects were good enough to let you ignore the preachy garbage. My friend is a movie goer so he has developed the ability to filter out the proselytizing so he can enjoy the entertainment portion of films. Maybe that is a skill you acquire after sitting through a certain quantity of movies or maybe it is a natural personality trait. I know I lack it, which is why I don’t watch many movies. If it is going to be preachy, I’ll just skip it.

There’s also the Star Wars element. For good or ill, the franchise has a become Star Trek for the fake nerd movement. Women who “fucking love science” seem to be big into Star Wars. I liked the movies as a kid, but I was always a Star Trek guy. I also tended toward real science fiction, the stuff you had to read. Even as a kid, Star Wars struck me as a bad western with good special effects set in space. It’s why I only got around to watching the “prequels” earlier this year when they were on free cable.

Star Wars is a good reminder that pop culture is aimed mostly at women and kids, so it is no country for old men. Peddling movies to young people is made easier by the fact they don’t know a lot. They simply have not been alive long enough to notice that this year’s blockbuster is the blockbuster from five years ago, just with different actors and explosions. They don’t know that Big Bang Theory is just Friends, with nerds instead of hot looking Manhattanites. This stuff is all new to them so they eagerly buy it up.

Women are also easy targets for pop culture because women are hard wired to notice what other women are doing. It’s why the fashion industry exists. Most men wear the same styles their whole life. Women change every year. That’s because of biology. Hollywood has figured this out so they put out films with female leads in the newest styles and fashions. Since the New Religion says all girls are really kick-ass ninja warriors, we get lots of films where 90-pound pixie ninjas with adorable haircuts.

The odious John Podhoretz claims that Hollywood figured out that action films would always attract male viewers so they decided to cast females in the lead to bring in the females. Podhoretz is an example of reversion to the mean, his father being an exceptionally smart man, but he may be correct here. This sounds like the sort of thing a corporate studio would do, thinking it is brilliant. Whether it works or not will never be tested because the committee said it was brilliant and the matter is closed. It strikes me as plausible, at least.

No matter the reason, the thing about modern movies is the habit of putting females in roles that should be played by men. Unlike the habit of casting a black guy in the smart guy role, this feminizing of the male lead never works as intended. There are smart black guys in the real world. There are no 90-pound females beating up full sized bad guys using nothing but ninja moves. That’s never happened. It’s never going to happen either. No one comes away thinking it will ever happen, other than the crazies in the cult.

The other day, I watched a movie called Sicario, which is about Mexican drug dealers and the US efforts to catch them. The movie is well done and a good two hours of entertainment. The one problem is they put a tiny little nymph in the lead role. The viewer is supposed to accept that this tiny little girl is not just a member of a tactical team, but recruited to be part of what amounts to an off-the-books Seal Team. Most of her screen time is her brooding and crying over the fact the boys don’t play by the rules.

Of course, the writers, directors and producers of our entertainments have to work within the rules the censors give them. We’re supposed to believe the censors were all sent packing, but they never went away. It’s just that they were replaced with ideological enforcers from the Cult. Instead of a prim faced Christian lady editing the scripts, it is a vinegar drinking lesbian from the Womyn’s Studies Department. The people making a living in Hollywood like their jobs so they play along as that is the path of least resistance.

The result is a paucity of male leads in movies these days. This probably has something to do with the collapse of the male audience for movies. Guys are not all that interested in Girrrlll Power!. Young males are spending their leisure time blowing stuff up and killing people in video games. It’s why the lunatics have been making war on gaming. They will not sleep until the last pale penis person is hunted down and forced to submit to the New Religion. Given the results thus far, it does appear that the effort has failed.

Maybe that means the Girrrrl Power! era is coming to a close. Movie makers need to make money so they may be forced to bring back the normal male leads. Maybe the next big thing in movies will be men who are not sobbing pussies, but old fashioned tough guys doing the hard work of being men. I hope so as I’m getting old and it will not be long before I’m spending my days in the movie theater with the other geezers, before we head to Denny’s for a 4:00 PM dinner.

I don’t known about that dream of going back to the movie theater. In the interval between 1970 and about 2000 I was taking my family to the movies about weekly, and the numbers matched up with church. I’m sitting here now trying to remember the last movie I ever went to. I do remember when we began to slow down. It was when we were watching a film and my boys and I figured out the plot and ending in the first five minutes and the guys sitting in front of us thanked us for ruining the movie for… Read more »

I’m fond of telling people the last theater movie I watched was Blazing Saddles, 1974, Maxwell AFB theater, 35¢. Nothing but pre-80s movies on TV since then. I read Z’s post, but the mating habits of the Martian ground squirrel are as familiar to me as anything in the post.

I’m the same way with Rifftrax. Never saw any of the Star Wars prequels until the Rifftrax guys recorded their mocking commentary, then I went out and bought the dvds second-hand. I’d never have seen a lot of blockbusters at all if it weren’t for Rifftrax.

you answered your own question, with the part near the end about “collapsing male attendance”. video games are indeed supplanting movies for lots of males, but also for a lot of girls. the interesting thing is that cost of production for a game is much less than for a movie, so the left’s hold on the culture is breaking.

Which outrageous ticket prices and concessions combined with a crappy product makes for a pretty sure way to kill off your mainline business. I remember back in the ’90’s I guess it would have been when a lot of theaters where not maintained. Ticket prices were not too bad but when you walk in and your feet stick to the carpet and the movie goers are making noise and are inconsiderate of others and there is no one policing the environment, well, even a fair price seems outrageous and not worth the effort. Then someone had the bright idea to… Read more »

One of the weirder trends I’ve seen among women who are my age is the explosion of interest in fandom. I’m not talking about people who enjoy author X and will always buy their new books upon release. I’m talking about grown women in their twenties or thirties who dress up as movie characters and can discuss Harry Potter for goes and spend a lot of money to collect related trinkets or go to conventions. It’s very strange.

People need to be a part of things, I guess. Instead of belonging to church or civic groups, people are joining Harry Potter clubs. At Yale, they actually had people riding around on brooms pretending to play the game from the Potter books.

I guess what I find weirdest is that a lot of my female peers don’t want to be adults. My little girl dresses up as a princess and pretends quite intensely at stuff like this, which I think is normal. But to find adults totally immersed in stuff that is marketed to children baffles me. I would be embarrassed to share the same taste in movies as an elementary schooler. I remember taking a great deal of pride when I was younger in doing and looking and acting grown up, and that seems to have vanished. A friend took her… Read more »

Even more discouraging is how our society promotes toys for girls that focus on “little princess” or other fictional-fantasy characters who don’t actually exist. Where boys are brought up with toys that represent construction workers, firemen, race car drivers and people who actually do exist and in real life careers. And then the feminists wonder why girls have problems with not being able to achieve what boys do. Is there really a question?

*shrugs* My daughter was yanking dresses out of the laundry basket and trying to dress herself since six months old. I’m a frumpy, not-fashionable practical sort of dresser and she didn’t get this adoration of frippery from me. She clearly has feelings about how she should look and I sure as hell didn’t program this into her with my behavior or princess toys. Some girls just want to girl. Also, I think you have missed the yuge push in the US into careerist toys for girls. STEM Barbie! Goldieblocks! This kind of crap has been around since I was a… Read more »

@ Marina – I would advise caution telling your daughter’s school career guidance counselor you want your little girl to grow up being a mommy and/or homemaker. That kind of anti-feminist talk might get you sent to the re-education camps.:-)

Schoolteachers? I’m in America: homeschooling is legal here! I worry less about programming my daughter to be something than protecting her from what I got in school. Bright, academically inclined girls face a lot of pressure to be high achievers and I found that very, very stressful growing up. I’d rather she not deal with that. If she wants to be STEM Princess Genius, fine, but I don’t want her pressured into it.

She is a “Girlie girl.” And that’s ok. It’s just in the genes. My girls were pretty much the same way except the oldest went big into girls sports, ice skating, softball, but balanced that with piano and jazz vocals. The youngest is an artist and the middle one is well … trying to find her way. Middle child is a difficult spot but did Drum Corps playing Trumpet and really grew nicely through that experience.

Not enough men left in German for that to be a viable commercial proposition. But fear not! Hitler youth might not be on the table, but Merkeljugend will do just as well – in Germany, it can be “Sklavin Barbie” and “Merkeljugend Mohammed”. Awesome, innit?

The saddest thing is, “pixie ninja” is at least plausible in sci-fi… if it’s actually sci-fi. Some sort of exoskeleton, or hell, The Force, and sure, some 90 lb girl can throw Schwarzenegger around. (I’m pretty sure they actually did this in a Terminator movie once, but who’s counting?). So doubtless this new SJWars movie goes out of its way to show us that nope, this iteration of Girl Luke Skywalker is just some gal, who probably took time out of her STEM career to kick Darth Vader’s ass…. Pathetic.

I hear you, and that’s what last year’s movie was like to a T. Although it is generally presumed that that girl character is in fact either a partly trained Jedi Apprentice or the blood offspring of a Skywalker, Luke or Leia, so basically she kicks ass easily because Force. And as the Sith villain was an emo loser, I could tolerate this. This year’s action girl is more in the tradition of Ellen Ripley. She’s fit enough and toughminded enough to respond to circumstances, and becomes important solely because of circumstances. And operates in an ensemble and at no… Read more »

Nedd, I watched it last night., I was thinking of recommending it as well. Very good movie. Like No Country for Old Men but less violent. I would love to see Tommy Lee Jones matched up with Jeff Bridges in another Texas Ranger type movie.Maybe have Chuck Norris too. It would be awesome. I really enjoyed Jeff Bridges character’s insulting jokes. I winced at the un PC ball busting which is pretty rare in a movie today.I also liked Sicario but Z is right as usual. The female lead was tolerable because the rest of it was so well done.… Read more »

NO! NO! NOT Chuck Norris! If I want to see the best wooden acting available Steven Segal movies are around. Or I can go to the park and watch tai chi. I’ve seen dead mimes with more expression than Chuck Norris. YMMV, of course. Now Jeff Bridges is a treat.

@ Nedd – Agreed, “Hell or High Water” was very good. But I was puzzled why they set the story in real Texas towns, but actually filmed it all in New Mexico. That i didn’t understand. But I guess that’s Hollywood.

Everything is filmed in New Mexico now. The state offers subsidies and tax benefits to the productions, and there is now a well-established infrastructure that supports the filming process. The filming is done in areas that have great light and natural beauty, but are generic enough to pass for Texas, Wisconsin, Afghanistan, or North Africa, to cite a few recent examples. The lighting, staging, and filming is very exacting, generally of a quality that far exceeds the writing and often the acting. Filming in a known environment means that the studios do not need to “remake the wheel” in an… Read more »

Maybe home theater is one reason a lot of mature males have dropped out of the multiplex experience. I can sit at home and watch a pretty decent version of a film, on a screen subjectively as large as in the multiplex and in surround sound. Practically free via Netflix et al. No waiting in line for overpriced tickets and snacks. No teenagers and Negroes yakking during the film. But home theater is nearly an exclusively upper-middle class male phenomenon. I’ve never known or heard of a woman with a home theater system. They might watch a movie on their… Read more »

Yep – when I see a movie preview, it falls into one of four categories:
1. See it in the theater – rarely happens
2. See it when it hits Blu-ray
3. Maybe watch it when it’s on cable – that’s where Rogue One landed
4. Never internationally watch it – where I file most previews.

Most of the Ladies around where I live are definitely Christian women. Which in the way of those so called “bitter clinging” traditions, they are every day heroines to me. They are actually well respected by the men folk, the reverse being true also, but for reasons you don’t see portrayed in any media in this era I know of. But I live in about as rural and remote part of WV as can be, and it is very traditional rural America in the classic movie sense. This is typical as an example, my best friend, his wife loves squirrel… Read more »

One of the obnoxious things about feminism has been the collapse of decent lady-media. I would like to read magazines about stuff like cooking and cleaning and housewifery and childrearing and advice on doing it better/faster/cheaper/prettier/more easily. There’s a lot to mine here and older women’s magazines used to actually do this. But women’s magazines have moved toward either sexualized smut, stupid trashy consumerism, or encouraging low level resentment of your husband for failing to do enough around the house. Half of these magazines I wouldn’t even bring into the house because the covers are so inappropriate! There’s nobody outside… Read more »

It’s wholesome food. The industrial food chain leaves much to be desired. Peoples pallets get accustomed to it, and naturally procured food is repugnant to their tastebuds. I can’t eat processed industrial food, I feel poisoned the next day. More so now I’m older and my body isn’t as resilient. So to go over and have a plate of hand made buttermilk lard biscuits smothered with squirrel gravy, and fried taters and ramps, it doesn’t get any better in my book.

I hear you really. Women have been a greater target of cultural marxism than black people. It is just a different plantation. They don’t want women to be empowered, they want to enslave women, and destroying every vestige of self sufficiency and individualism, making womanly duties of family and industriousness, creativity, is inslavement. Mind and spirit slavery. It is how they rule souls. As the cultural marxist take off the gloves, every day they create more and more dirt people who begin to realize it doesn’t have to be this way, and so really, they begin to see the old… Read more »

Sounds like an excellent business opportunity for someone with the financial backing and publishing knowledge. Especially with Deplorable virtues coming out of the closet with PE Trump, a lot of what Doug discusses will, I think, be making a comeback. It is needed to reverse what has been going on and is important in supplementing the “Draining of the Swamp.” That alone won’t fix much. It gets back to the culture. We have to win there too!

Brilliant observation LP!
I believe it is the dimmitude of the legacy media who have set out over decades to diminish and create an image that us dirt people don’t exist, and what they do acknowledge is as we are called, Deplorable. The truth is nothing could be further from the truth. We are legion, we quietly go about our lives only desiring to be left alone and live productive happy lives full of simple pleasures. It is not asking for anything to live unmolested by these psychopaths and meddlers.

They do have suburban equivalents. My wife is one. Not a shooter but a cook, plumber, carpenter, electrician; does anything she has to. Has put up with me many years, no small feat. We have a number of friends not quite as versatile but just as determined. The feminists get the media attention but real women still exist and understand real things have to be done in the world.

Yep. She’s picked by the CIA/Delta team solely as a pawn, to give FBI legal cover to stateside black ops. She gets easily physically manhandled no fewer than four times by real tough guys. She is inconsequential to all the key action. I loved Sicario in part because it ISN’T a girl power tale.

Rogue One has many adolescent features common to all SW since the beginning, so I won’t belabour. On that struck me as interesting, and which it has in common with the execrable The Force Awakens last year, is the absence of romantic entanglements. This strikes me as a noteworthy cultural shift being reflected. For good or ill, Han Solo and Princess Leia carried on a flirtation by word and gesture that was at least imitative of Tracy and Hepburn or Bogart and Bacall, or Bogart and …. And then implicitly consummated the relationship. Explicitly presumably offscreen. In the prequels, Amidala… Read more »

Rogue One does do something that SW hasn’t done well in the past- convey the sense of a war movie. It has intelligence operations, covert assassination missions, Rebel intelligence officers ordering people to do dangerous and dark things, other such officers taking those orders without question, and the implication that they have done many such things in the past. It has hard faced generals making tough calls. It has fog of war and decisions made under duress or the exigency of circumstances, including to take advantage of sudden opportunities caused by the random element or indeed by mutinous forces. It… Read more »

Forest Whitaker. That killed it for me right off the bat. During the Obozo years, the over exposure of him, Samuel L. Jackson, Jamie “Rayciss” Foxx, and other black actors in the effort to “condition” everyone out of their latent racism has had the opposite effect on me. When everything “has to” have da black man in it, den I willz shine it on. I used to like many of these guys but now, I cringe every time I see them in another lead role. The last one was Denzel Washington, whom I greatly admire for his body of work,… Read more »

”but I was always a Star Trek guy. I also tended toward real science fiction, the stuff you had to read. Even as a kid, Star Wars struck me as a bad western with good special effects set in space.” Ironically, Star Trek has always been ”the western set in space”, even Gene Roddenberry dubbed it ”Wagon Train to the stars” when pitching the show. Not to mention that many of the writers and actors were TV western regulars at the time. That said, the first two movies of the SW franchise were good, then it’s been all downhill from… Read more »

“Firefly” was an attempt to make a real space western. It has huge nerd credibility even today, which might be considered a black mark. But it’s leading man Nathan Fillion carried off the funny/cocky version of trad manliness pretty well, and Adam Baldwin as Jayne Cobb was a fan favourite in the non-crap-taking male role. Yeah, it has some ironic gen-X tendencies that suited me. But looked at without too much distortion it is the SF property friendliest to traditional American conservatism, western or southern sensibility, or indeed anything like Toryism. The sequel film Serenity is the Toriest SF thing… Read more »

I liked Firefly. It was funky and weird, without trying to be funky and weird. I don’t ask for a lot from movies. I just don’t ant to be lectured or insulted. Otherwise, I can put up with a lot. Firefly was just an honest attempt to entertain in an innovative way.

The other problem the SW franchise has is even more fundamental. From the start, Lucas saw it as (quite literally) a movie-length toy commercial. SW (ep 4, 1st) was literally designed that way. It helped get the first made, and made Lucas substantial bank but it also put it in a box it can’t escape, plugging the spin off products comes first, everything else second. It’s why they emphasize action scenes, as well as the ”you go girl”/multicultural stuff, gotta have as big a potential market as possible for those toys don’tcha know. Something no other print or video SF… Read more »

Don’t forget that Hollywood has also abandoned the cultivation of true “leading man” actors! The male actors now are all slender, semi-androgynous types who couldn’t lead a much more than a gay pride parade.

Not a single masculine, craggy face or muscled torso among them, unless the producers paid for real muscles ala “300”!.

Yep, the “girl power” thing drives me *nuts*! I get how some people like it for the different spin it puts on the film, some for the “see girls can do anything boys can do” politics and preachiness, while I just think it renders the whole movie pointless and silly, and even worse, tears down role models that boys want and need for their own growth. Even my wife, who is fairly conservative herself, thinks I’m over the top with my talent for finding preaching and anti-male, anti-Christian, anti-white bias just about everywhere. Maybe, but it’s one of those things… Read more »

I rather liked Sicario. I took it as a meditation on the costs alike of national security and of policing an imperial frontier, especially an increasingly permeable one. I could imagine that operation carried on by legionaries just as easily. Indeed, it is illustrative of the costs of a poorly defended border and could be usefully taken in tandem with “No Country for Old Men” in that vein. As the American empire declines, so its border reverts to its earlier, open frontier form. The New West becomes a bloodier version of the Old, after an interval of civilization. The Rhine,… Read more »

Sicario wasn’t bad. I agree with the comments above. Try making a Dirty Harry movie today and see how far that goes. I suspect many of the scenes today would be banned for racial profiling, stereotyping, chauvinistic and homophobic comments.

I wish they had done a third installation of the “Chronicles of Riddick” and “Hellboy”. Good fun action sci-fi! In my opinion, a good story line that stands on its own doesn’t need sex, foul language or gory violence. When those three start showing up in any movie, you know it’s going to be a weak production.

I do not consider myself a prude, but I AM old enough not to care for gratuitous and salacious explicit sex scenes (that do not advance the plot – if I wanted porn I’d watch it), crude language, and special effects-enhanced violence on-screen. My preference is for good drama (or comedy), well-written dialogue, character development, and good acting that totally subsumes the actor into the role, such that I forget who the actor is. I checked: in the last 12 months, the only movie that I’ve seen in an actual movie theater was Sully, which I quite enjoyed. Mostly, I… Read more »

Here here. I fast forward through the sex scenes. I’m 50. I know how it all works and I still have an imagination. Spare me the 10 minute love scene. It adds nothing to a movie. Just show the hero and heroine headed off to the bedroom and skip ahead to the rest of the story. I get it.

@ thezman – Yes, exactly. In “Saving Private Ryan” as horrible and gory as it was, it made sense and I had no problem with it. Same with “Fury”. But movies like “Saw” and “Texas Chainsaw Massacre” are blood and gore for the sake of being disgusting. However if you go back to some of the older war movies such as “The Bridges at Toko-Ri”, “Battle of Britain” or even the more recent “Pearl Harbor” the fighting scenes were very well done without tossing body parts around. As you say about bedroom scenes, I don’t need to see a head… Read more »

A great story by Lee Child. I would say “give it a try.” The plot is good enough and the acting not bad that you will pretty much forget it is Tom Cruz. Very patriotic character, and a Deplorable to the core.

Maybe I will give that one a chance. When the first one came out, I remember seeing a reviewer somewhere praise it for being the first action her movie in which the main character is obviously liberal. I forget what was the basis for that conclusion. I assume Reacher was fighting health insurance company villains.

If movie producers want to highlight the power of women, they need only look to some of the greatest figures in history rather than made up science-fiction characters. Ruth in the Old Testament, Catherine the Great of Russia, Queen Elizabeth and Queen Victoria of Great Britain, Isabella I of Spain, Catherine De Medici of France and most recently Golda Meir of Israel. These are the obvious top contenders. And I’m sure many of you could add a number of American women who have also been great leaders and heroines in the course of American history. It is insulting that Hollywood… Read more »

PE was a required course when I went to college & there were many options. I chose Judo & it turned out it was Judo-based but taught by ex-military & it leaned more to hand-to-hand combat & less formal Judo. My first Judo lessons but it came naturally, I liked it & did well for a beginner. Judo is based upon leverage rather than strength so if you can get your opponent in position you can throw him down without too much strength. Thus, sparring (randori) partners were random & not size matched. I weighed 205 & had done much… Read more »

There are two moderately implausible girl power moments in it, but I just finished Man in the High Castle season 2. Between the dirigibles, the rockets, and this, I’m beginning to wonder what’s going on in Bezos’s mind. Its proven to be quite interesting

(For the record, this is what pops into my head whenever a discussion about the movies happens anywhere: https://youtu.be/RfC0Rr3mhZU?t=49s ) “No matter the reason, the thing about modern movies is the habit of putting females in roles that should be played by men. Unlike the habit of casting a black guy in the smart guy role, this feminizing of the male lead never works as intended.” The problem with movies today is that they won’t let you lose yourself in the experience. Somewhere, somehow no matter how much you are willing to turn off your brain and just go with… Read more »

There are a few things you need to know about making your next movie. If you include these, your movie will be a success: 1) The world uses bullets that when shot at a fleeing car, can only shatter the back window; 2) All scientists used to wear white coats, but now must wearily take off their glasses and look troubled about what they are doing/thinking; 3) The smartest people are the black actors, the most evil ones will usually be white; 4) People can outrun explosions but only if they are the good guy; 5) All wisdom will come… Read more »

Sicario … very good movie. Woman lead? I forget. I really like Benicio del Toro. And his tough guy act was great, especially when it takes out the family and killer of his family decked out in all black SWAT gear. A thing of beauty as justice was served. Yep, I have to agree with you on the Girrrrl Power thang. About the only memorable movie I really enjoyed watching was Kick-Ass with Chloe what’shername. Cute as a button and “kick ass!” Good action, over the top costumes (I guess that fits the tribe that does the dress up thing… Read more »

Sicario blew me away with the cinematography. Extremely well done. The cast was very good EXCEPT the lead female role and her black buddy sidekick. That never made sense to me and that plot-line made no sense. Pure SJW crap. It’s a shame because the rest of the movie was excellent. The PC/SJW preachy folks just can’t help infecting movies and screenplays with their bile.

Geez, Z-man. It’s like you were sitting a row in front of me when I saw The Force Awakens. I hated it and swore off what remained of my Star Wars interest (apart from the soundtracks) forever. 80% grrrl power nonsense, 10% sweet nostalgia for a real movie hero, sidekick, and noble steed, and 10% predictable, silly nonsense when he’s killed off in the most ignominious, seen-from-a-mile-away manner anyone could have devised. Ugh!

Funny, as Star Trek (TOS) was pitched as a ‘wagon train to the stars’, but Star Wars gets the Western label. From what I have seen of it (which isn’t much), Star Wars is hardly Sci Fi at all, it’s pure fantasy that just happens to be set in space, which does not automatically qualify it as science fiction IMHO—the story is not centered around the technology’s impact on the characters in-universe (but it has robots and FTL so, I guess that does qualify it enough in most minds). If you replace each instance of ‘The Force’ with ‘magic’ and… Read more »